Spike, a psychologist and activist, and Jane, a philosopher and writer, leave their dead-end temping jobs in Toronto and head for Paris — in their lunch break — by car, stopping frequently to stock up on chocolate.

En route they pick up X, an extraterrestrial from a planet where chocolate is one of the major food groups and testosterone is a prohibited substance. X is cosmically, galactically lost in Earth’s backwardly gendered society.

Jane and Spike decide to take a detour and help X find astronomers and physicists who know the space–time coordinates for Earth, starting with America’s top universities in Boston before trying NASA and CalTech. The more they travel, the further they seem to be from a solution to X’s problem — and from Paris.

This out-of-the-ordinary road trip is chock-full of social, political and environmental commentary, feminist insights, and plenty of laughs.